First things first. Your audience. Any content you create needs to focus on providing solutions to the challenges your audience face. Therefore, knowing your audience is key to your success. But how do you know who your ideal customer is?

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to look through the eyes of a Nutritionist within the Health and Wellbeing Industry to create my examples, but the same process can be applied to any industry or sector.

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1. Identify your ideal customer

You need to create a persona for your ideal client and make sure you really get to know them and understand their needs. Focus on your main ‘ideal customer’ before you create further client personas. Grab a piece of paper and pencil and let's get started.

Add four headings at the top: General | Specific | Pain points | Needs

Under each heading write down information about your ideal customer.

Here’s our Nutritionist example:

General – Female / 40-55 yrs / works full-time
Specific – Sally / age 42 yrs / lives in Canterbury, Kent / works in London / Mum of 2 kids
Pain points – weight gain / busy schedule / trouble sleeping
Needs – food plan / control / rest

Keep the answers simple and concise. Don’t forget the small pain points as well as the big ones as small changes can make such a difference and could be just what your customer is looking for.

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2. What is your ideal customer’s lifestyle?

We want to take ‘Sally’ and pop her into her surrounding community and understand her lifestyle; who does she trust, what does she like, what would feel familiar to her? The answers to these types of questions will help you create the solutions to Sally’s needs.

Grab another piece of paper and put a collection of ‘Sallys’ in the centre of your page and draw a circle around them. We’re going to think about our collection of ‘Sallys’ and their lifestyle. It’s going to end up looking like a spider diagram with a lifestyle example sitting at the end of a spoke. You’re looking for core lifestyle traits that will be general enough to cover all your ‘Sallys’.

Here’s our Nutritionist example:

• Mother
• Works full or part-time
• Kids activities/sports
• Lives in South East
• Cooking family dinners
• Exercise class/group
• Interested in health & wellbeing
• Family activities
• Meets friends at coffee shop
  

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3. What are your ideal customers searching for online?

We want to know what our ideal customers are searching for and have their lifestyle traits in mind. They will generally be searching for solutions to their lifestyle challenges. You might want to use ‘Google Keyword Planner’ to help start your keyword searches and make this easier for you.

Here’s our Nutritionist example:

If Sally is cooking family dinners she might be looking for inspirational ideas that are healthy, cost-effective and time efficient. Here are five searches she might try. Aim for ten in total for each lifestyle trait:

• ‘Healthy family dinners’
• ‘Quick meals’
• ‘How to get kids to eat vegetables’
• ‘Low-calorie evening meals’
• ‘Low-cost dinners for four’

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4. Creating a targeted headline for your ideal customer

We now need to turn those search terms into headlines that are going to inform the content you create. This could translate into new pages on your website, reshape your sales content both on and offline, form blog post ideas or social media content. The list goes on. Using Sally’s nine lifestyle traits we now have 90 potential story ideas that we need to convert into punchy headlines and content.

Here’s our Nutritionist potential Headlines:

‘Healthy family dinners’ = 5 healthy dinners the kids will love
‘Quick meals’ = Quick 20 minute nutritious meals
‘Low-cost dinners for four’ = 10 Low-cost family meals full of nutrition

If you follow this process and find you are struggling to find solutions to your ideal customers searches, I would suggest you review your persona as may need to make some changes to your perceived ideal customer.

Your content will only be engaging to the right audience. A single person with no children will unlikely be interested in our Nutritionist’s Blog post about ‘Creating healthy family dinners the kids will love!’. Whereas, Sally is going to be thrilled that she found ’10 low-cost family meals full of nutrition’ and better still if that included links to recipes. That would be another problem solved in her busy life and she might even get a better night’s sleep not having to consider meal planning!

If Sally is happy with what she found, she will not only recommend the source to her friends, but she will return looking for further information. Perhaps this time she notices the Nutritionist 6 week programme to ‘Improve gut health for women over 40’ and how it will give her back energy and help her lose weight. These are solutions Sally has been looking for and now she has a trusted source from which she is more like to purchase.

Understand your audience and you will not only be able to create an endless list of engaging content, but it will build trust and authority with your customers.

If you would like to know more about this subject or how you can create an engaging website, please drop us a line at Canvass for a free consultation.